"My name is Martin. I've been a grad students at UAF (University of Alaska Fairbanks) in the Masters program in Marine Biology for about four years now.

"In the sea ice project working with Rolf my role was as technician, so I was basically organizing our gear before we would go out, and making sure all our sleds were loaded up with all the various paraphernalia that you need to go out and dirll holes in the sea ice and sample water. Our project was to get off the ice breaker on either a little ladder that they would lower down to the ice, or with a helicopter, which was the preferred way to do it. My job was basically to pack all the gear before we got out. To double, triple check and make sure that we had everything, because once you're twenty miles away from the ice breaker, if you forget something it's not a good thing.

And then once we got onto the ice we would unpack everything. We would take some ice cores and then we would section the ice cores so that we could look at each individual strata in the sea ice later on and determine what kind of biota is living inside there. We'd also cut a larger hole in the sea ice so we could lower a device called a ctd. This thing would basically give us various water temperature and clorofil readings as it goes down into the water and then we'd pull it back up by hand.

Most of the work was definitely getting things together and then cleaning up afterword. You have a pretty limited time on the ice and you want to get as much work done as you can. And then as soon as you're done it's time to go back to the ship because of polar bears."

Text on screen "Wait a second.... POLAR BEARS"

Martin: "It was a worry, I mean whenever we were on the ice directly from the ship we had what's called a bear guard. It was a Coast Guard person, fully dressed up in their survival suit with a rifle. And they would stand and watch us the whole time, just to make sure there were no bears around. So it was expected that we would see some bears, but sadly we did not.

"We were just out during the day which was really neat because we got to see every sunrise and sunset, which on the sea ice is just spectacular. It was really, really cool. Just go, go go all the time. Whenever there's a chance to work, we were working. You get into sort of a motion after the first couple days, and time just starts to fly by. You really lose all sense of what day it is in the week, because it doesn't really matter. You have your work cut out for you that day, you know what you're going to do. You set all your stuff out, and you just do it. One day just begins to blend into the next. And it's actually better to be busy on a ship like that than it is to be idle, because you can get bored pretty easily.

At the end of the busy day there's still work to be done. Back on the ship, the scientists have to download data to their computers and store samples for later analysis. Finally, they repack the gear for another day on the ice. On the USCGC Healy, every day is a work day. The team will continue this routine each day for several weeks!

The team is excited to begin piecing together the food web, but analysis will have to wait until later, back in the lab in Fairbanks.